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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570691
EAN num: 9780393324815
ISBN number: 0393324818
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: 2004-04
Publishing house: W. W. Norton & Company
Sale Popularity Level: 1109
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Amazon.com:
Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.
Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a very first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe
Brief Book Summary:
'One of the best baseball—and management—books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.'—Forbes
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of sucess in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only 'the single most influential baseball book ever' (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what 'may be the best book ever written on business' (Weekly Standard).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?
With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of sucess in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.
What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of sucess for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.
Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.
In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win...how can we not cheer for David?
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Rated by buyers 
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For many years, I walked by this book on the shelf of my local library and gave it no notice, as the "Moneyball" title gave me the false impression that it was all about economics. I should have heeded the book-readers creed: Never judge a book by its cover. From the very very first chapter, I was hooked by the unique philosophy of the text and fascinated by its divergence from traditional baseball maxims. Essentially, Michael Lewis (essentially a conduit for Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane) discusses two subjects:
First, there is the radically different method, started by Bill James, of evaluating players. Instead of the traditional home runs and RBI stats, James (and later Beane) determined that on-base and slugging percentages were the best predictors of successful performance. Instead of looking at factors beyond the batters control (like RBI), one must look at how the batter controls each plate appearance. I could go on and on about the theories developed in this book, but suffice it to say that they are (or at least were in 2001) a complete digression from traditional baseball wisdom, thus are generally scoffed at by "real" baseball people.
The second portion of the books discusses how Billy Beane uses those new scouting methods to keep his small-market A's viable in the baseball market. Though fans moaned when Beane traded away such stars as Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, and Jason Giambi, Beane contends in this book that those trades were necessary in order to reduce payroll, plus he was able to find comparable (if not better) players through his new "sabermetric" scouting method. Being a fan of the small-market Minnesota Twins, I was most fascinated with this portion of the book, trying to determine if the Twins were following a Beane model of business.
Overall, I have absolutely no answers (being neither a baseball insider nor a statistician) as to whether or not James and Beane's theories have merit. However, they do make a very convincing argument filled with valid examples to prove their points. Plus, no baseball fan can argue with the results, as the small-market A's always seem to be in contention.
If you are a die-hard baseball lifer like myself, this is a must-read book. Even if you scoff at every single idea (though I don't think you will) it is worth being exposed to.
Rated by buyers -
Michael Lewis' Moneyball, is a great introduction to the increasing role statistics play creating a winning baseball team. Lewis profiles the A's owner, Billy Beane, and shows how Beane has managed to create a winning team despite a small budget. It begins to put to rest the use of worthless stats, such as RBI, which is really only a measure of how good the batters are in front of you.
As a former baseball coach, I was interested in the chapter on how Beane selects players from the amateur draft. He creates a strong case for players attending college before entering the draft, especially if one's life long dream is to play for the A's.
If you enjoy Moneyball, I would suggest reading other similar books such as Baseball Between the Numbers, The Fielding Bible, Mind Games, and The Baseball Economist. In general, anything by the Baseball Prospectus people is a great choice.
Rated by buyers -
It's simple: If you are a fan of baseball-meaning you go to more than 2-3 games a year, or watch a lot of games on TV-then you need to read Moneyball.
Moneyball tells the story of how the Oakland A's, with a limited budget, manage to out smart almost every other team in baseball. Basically, in a nutshell-they use science instead of old baseball adages, and apply statistics to better analyze a players ability to get on base and avoid making an out-the key to winning games in the long-run.
Great book, well written. Highly recommended to all baseball fans.
Rated by buyers -
Michael Lewis made his name writing books describing the people behind our financial system -- books that were inevitably described, for some reason, as "funny" or "hilarious." Perhaps these same reviewers were in stitches while reading Javascript technical manuals or the Kyoto Accords. Truly, I saw neither any humour nor any attempts to be funny in these books, which were, sadly, just dull.
How refreshing, then, to have him find a topic better suited to his tone. Yes, money plays a role, but what's described here is the pursuit of excellence, and the courage to flout conventional wisdom in the pursuit of a competitive edge.
A fascinating subject about dedicated professionals. True, these people may come off as a little singleminded, but they have to be (as this book demonstrates) in order to compete against people equally dedicated to finding an edge.
Rated by buyers -
I so love the work of Michael Lewis because this story, and another favorite, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, are essentially about stepping back to consider groupthink. Groupthink is a topic that fascinates me. I haven't read The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, but it's about startups and silicon valley? Hmmmm... it might be about groupthink too. I'll check it out this weekend.
In Moneyball, Lewis examines the effects an outsider can have on the group, in this case, Major League Baseball. That's an extremely high level but, if you're like me, that's about all you need to know. Even if you don't care for baseball, I think you'll enjoy Moneyball. You might even be angry that Congress and the media give so much time to baseball. Since baseball is hard to avoid in America, I think people should try to understand it better. And even the most die hard, stat-loving baseball geek I know learned things from reading Moneyball. So whether you're a total insider to baseball, or a complete outsider to baseball, I think you should read, and that you'll enjoy, Moneyball.
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